


That does not warm, but burn

by bookoftheazuresky



Series: star followed star [10]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Aerial Combat, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Confrontations, Duelling, Gen, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:36:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookoftheazuresky/pseuds/bookoftheazuresky
Summary: Post-Earth, a revived Megatron thinks he can take the Decepticons back from his second. Sunstorm has other plans.





	That does not warm, but burn

**Author's Note:**

> This installment is Spotlight: Megatron-adjacent. Sunstorm's about a million years old here.
> 
> When "I hope you die in a fire" becomes extremely literal.

The _vop_ of Skywarp’s teleportation into the base commander’s office made Sunstorm look up sharply, already keying up his combat systems. “Megatron,” the dark seeker blurted, “Soundwave and Shockwave bridged here with a mech they’re claiming is _Megatron._ ”

Sunstorm stared at Skywarp stupidly, his processor rechecking the last few moments of his memory files due to inconsistent input.

He’d _been there_ when the medics had determined Megatron’s frame to be beyond repair, after his stupid stunt trying to fight Prime. Soundwave had vanished with it soon afterwards, and Sunstorm had rolled his optics and written the communications mech off. It had been an annoyance, but also a relief- a confrontation with Megatron’s loyalists postponed as he consolidated his control of the Decepticons, _and_ Soundwave wasn’t around to remind people of the previous commander or play his blackmail games.

Acid Storm commed him. “Sir,” the laconic seeker said, his voice tight with tension, “we’ve got a situation. Please update Skywarp with coordinates, we need you on the ground _now_.”

Protocol drilled into Sunstorm since his creation date had him reply, “Acknowledged.” The elder seeker signed off, and Sunstorm forced himself to stand. He slapped his own cheeks, then shook all of his plating until it ruffled. He sleeked everything back down hard and turned his attention back to Skywarp.

“Face up,” Sunstorm told him, suiting action to words as he settled a neutral mask over his own features. A quick check of his weapons systems told him everything was operational.

“Right,” Skywarp said, banishing the fear from his face. He grabbed Sunstorm’s forearm with close to his usual verve and they teleported.

They appeared above one of the more rarely used landing fields of the Vanilt base, a few hundred meters up. Thundercracker, Acid Storm, Nova Storm, and a number of more junior Air Force members were in the air or perched on nearby structures. Ground Forces mechs were gathering too, with the air of expectant spectators. There would be no keeping this quiet.

Sunstorm took in the IFFs of the mechs on the ground and their positioning as Thundercracker dropped to his usual position: Razorclaw, bold as usual and apparently conversing with the new arrivals; Windsweeper, positioned in support of Razorclaw but visibly uneasy; Ion Storm, casual, wings high, the cause of Windsweeper’s paranoia with the precisely calculated distance at which he stood. Opposite them: Soundwave, in executive officer’s position; Shockwave, further back; and a huge dark mech whose ident tag purported him to be Megatron. Decepticon Supreme Commander.

Like Pit he was.

“They spacebridged in,” Acid Storm informed him over tightbeam encrypted comms, which might stall Soundwave for a breem or two. “Ion says Soundwave and Shockwave are legitimate.” The deliberate omission of any kind of vouchsafe for Megatron’s authenticity was its own message- if the Intelligence agent had detected any flaws, he would have led with that.

In the end, it didn’t matter anyway. Sunstorm had no intention of handing back command, whether to a drone Shockwave had cooked up or to the genuine article.

“Acknowledged.” Sunstorm dropped and landed with his usual grace, his trinemates a sparkbeat behind him. As he approached, Ion Storm dipped his wings in brief acknowledgement and stepped out of his way. Windsweeper backed up in a vector opposite to the seeker, unwilling to stand near him. Smart mech.

Razorclaw dipped his bright head to Megatron, but his gold visor was on Sunstorm when he said, “Sir.” He moved to the right, the same direction as Windsweeper, and Sunstorm stepped into the space that he had vacated.

“Air Commander,” Megatron said. If Sunstorm had intended to hand back command, this would have been the place to do it.

Instead, he told Soundwave, “I am disappointed in you. I would have thought you knew better by now.”

The tension in the atmosphere immediately skyrocketed. Soundwave actually shifted his weight back minutely. Shockwave’s single optic focused more tightly. Sunstorm favored his erstwhile creator with a shadow of a sneer, then looked back to Megatron. His tactical suite flicked online, starting to draw in the wealth of information offered by his sensors and scans and work out a plan of attack. He let it work, vorns of keeping his posture unintimidated settling into place.

Behind him, he could tell that Windsweeper was edging farther away, not having bargained for this.

“I wish to speak to you about your tenure as leader of the Decepticons.” Sunstorm crossed his arms across his cockpit and cocked his head, fighting back a snarl. There was no point in responding. That was what Megatron wanted. Sunstorm wasn’t interested in obliging.

Megatron was perfectly capable of filling the silence himself. “Three years ago, I fell in battle and you assumed command. You did not overthrow me. You saw a gap and you meekly stepped in to fill it.” The big mech started to move as if to circle him. Sunstorm dropped his arms and moved to keep Megatron in his sights, a pair of predacons circling. _Playing down his tactical errors as a ‘fall in battle,” check._ _Too stupid to realize what the chain of command is for, also check._

Another dramatic pause. Sunstorm waited this one out too. “Silent? So it falls to me to summarize your achievements. Under your rule, the Decepticons have withdrawn from the majority of their conquests, allowing them to fall into Autobot hands. Supplies are short. Fleshlings nip at the flanks. You can’t even keep the fleet in line.” His contempt got the better of him, and he bared fangs. All of that had been the case _before_ Earth, he’d just admitted he didn’t have the mechs to hold the conquests. To say they were in Autobot hands was a vast overstatement- the ‘bots lacked the soldiers to station on those planets as well.

Megatron stopped, a half-circle away from where he started, his back pointedly to Skywarp and Thundercracker, leaving Soundwave and Shockwave at Sunstorm’s wings. A sea of red and violet and gold optics surrounded them all, bright with tension and uncertainty. “Eons and eons of shameless treachery. And yet, Starscream, this spark-quenchingly wretched mess you’ve made of leadership is the most affronting.”

Silence fell for a single moment, as shock replaced the atmosphere of anxiety.

Sunstorm involuntarily huffed out a vent. His intakes hitched again, then he realized that he was laughing. Bleak, bitter, half-hysterical laughter clawed its way out from his spark and shook his wings. Their faces! He couldn’t have asked for better. Alarmed optics were jumping from him to Megatron and back again.

He’d jumped off of the expected script, and Megatron was set back on his heels for a moment. Sunstorm took the initiative, wiping cleaning fluid from his optics. “An excellent speech. Except for the fact that your little soliloquy is about a million years out of date.” He dropped his voice. “You _dare_ speak to me that way. After everything. After the wreckage you’ve made of our species- of our Cause. You dare come here and point at _me_ as everything that has gone wrong. I’m _not_ sorry to say that you are incorrect. That responsibility lies with _you_.”

He gestured around. “Witness, _my lord_ , my work at salvaging _your_ mistakes. It is what I was _made for_ , after all. _Your_ overweening pride. _Your_ overextension of our forces. _Your_ choices on Earth, that cut us off from communication and kept us there just to toy with Optimus Prime. _I_ cannot keep the fleet in line? Turmoil has not paid more than lip service to you for more than a hundred years.”

“You take me to task for the behaviors of _your_ disobedient _pets_? When you got yourself killed by one of those organics you deride.” Sunstorm took a step forward, opening up more of his outlier ability and leaning hard into the stellar burn of it. Decaying black skittered over Megatron’s armor as nanites died in swathes. The smarter Decepticons scattered, trying to hit minimum safe distance.

Go straight for plasma, Sunstorm told himself. If that new frame didn’t have integrated radiation shielding around the vitals, Shockwave was an idiot. Sunstorm needed to hit the limits of his outlier ability as quickly as possible if he wanted to end the fight in his favor.

“I, Sunstorm of Carcharias, challenge you, here and now, before these witnesses, for the position of Supreme Decepticon Commander.” Sunstorm smiled thinly. “If you fear for your life, of course, you can always kneel.”

“So it’s come to this,” Megatron mused. At his negligent wave, Soundwave and Shockwave and the rest of the spectators cleared even more space. Ion Storm took a second to flick him a tightbeam comm with an encrypted datapacket, then bounced up onto one of the fuel depot’s sheltering platforms where the rest of his trine was waiting. “You certainly took your time.”

“I play this game on _my_ terms, not yours.” Thundercracker and Skywarp only moved when Sunstorm nodded to them. They joined Acid Storm, and Sunstorm banished them from his processor. He couldn’t afford distractions.

The decrypted datapacket loaded itself into his tactical suite, the results of Ion’s heavily upgraded and specialized sensors telling him _exactly_ where vital systems were located in this new upgraded body. It suggested the range and specs of the new railgun based on the scans, and highlighted vulnerable power conduits in the arm and shoulder that he should focus on to cripple it.

Megatron sighed like Sunstorm was mildly disappointing and began, “I suppose I’m going to have to start-“

The motion was almost _delicate_ , a flick of the wrist, but the gash in the heavy black armor was white-hot. The part of Sunstorm that wasn’t holding the plasma in a diamond grip noted the depth of the injury and was disappointed- he’d only severed one of the main fuel lines in the upper arm. It combusted as it hit air, dripping white-pink flame down Megatron’s arm. In the back of his processor, a countdown started to exsanguination.

Sunstorm kicked on his thrusters and pushed himself up to a distance where he estimated he could avoid a railgun shot. How much ammo did Megatron have? Energy weapons could be modulated to fire at low power, but mass weaponry was useless without proper ammunition.

Burning energon splattered widely as Megatron brought the gun to bear. Predictive software jumped into high gear and Sunstorm evaded one-two-three shots with the same skill that let him take on Jetfire in the air. A swipe of his palm and the ground below exploded into flames- gold, not white, but Sunstorm could feel the prickle of radiation against his wings, even from this distance. Heat _or_ light _or_ radiation- his outlier ability contained them all, and he could adjust the proportions of each to suit his needs.

Megatron transformed and took off, engine backwash pushing the flames back from where he had been standing. Sunstorm bit his lip until it split under his fangs, unmoving and concentrating hard. Ion’s scans said another main energon line would be about-

A spare processor thread cut his thrusters and Sunstorm dropped astroseconds before Megatron would have rammed him. That same almost-delicate flick, his finger describing an arc, and a narrow plasma blade cut into the stealth plane’s underside in another gout of white-pink. _Bleed._ A white and gold jet tore free from the burning spatter.

Sunstorm was programmed and designed, from the spark and processor out, to match one of the best fliers who had ever lived. Over his twelve thousand vorns of life, he’d spent maybe as much as a fifth of his conscious time in the air. He was literally made to fly, and he would only get better at it.

In contrast, Megatron had started life as a miner. He’d never taken an aerial alt in his entire functioning- Shockwave had to have rewritten his coding to a frankly obscene extent as well a rebuilding his frame from the protoform. He was big and well-armored and might even have a higher cruising speed than Sunstorm’s current alt- though he doubted it, considering it was based on an Earth design. That meant he had the same problem in the air as Jetfire when faced with a seeker: being able to hit a very maneuverable jet.

And there was always the problem of rebuilds- it took time to integrate a new frame. The more drastic the change, the more time it could take. Getting into a real combat situation before you were sure what your dimensions were and how your new weapons handled was a bad idea. By Sunstorm’s estimate, Megatron was about two days off of the repair bed. Not enough time to aim right.

Plasma cannons hammered at the gashes he’d opened in Megatron’s armor, driving them open wider. Megatron threw himself into a spin and smacked Sunstorm, sending them both clawing for aerial stability. It forced Sunstorm to transform back into root mode to kick off of Megatron’s bulk and redirect himself. He raked flashfire and radiation across sensitive flight sensors with a snarl. _Those_ burned- you couldn’t protect such things with armor.

Stupid fragger. No wonder he had an Air Commander if he thought that was the way to fly. “Override: H3291,” Sunstorm said around his bleeding lip, slowing himself to a hover with his antigravs as Megatron straightened out his flight. His right wing was screaming in complaint, and would have been bleeding if his armor wasn’t too hot to touch right now. He had dents all down that side as well. His fiery cloak started to flicker erratically as his weapons systems pulled more directly on his outlier ability.

He didn’t quite avoid the next railgun shot- it clipped, just barely, his uninjured wing. His out-of-control tumble lasted for reeling seconds, worsened by the starburst of pain that had bloomed over the lower edge of his left wing. It took wrenching force to align thrusters and antigravs to slow himself. He flicked damage reports away and called fire without direction or care. If he knew Megatron-

He did. A huge hand grabbed his waist, crunching plating into his protoform. Dizzily, he aimed down his arm at the dark chest.

Megatron, unconcerned, gloated, “So this is-“

 _Oh, shut up._ Sunstorm fired a photon cannon blast straight through the violet Decepticon brand and kept firing until the rifle’s connections blew. Superheated metal splattered his face from the holes the finger-thin white rays had left. Even too addled to aim properly, he’d hit at least a few energy-dense targets. The thought made him grin, all fangs. He owed Hotlink all the drinks.

Fingers loosened. Sunstorm wheezed through his vents and kicked himself free. A spark kindled in his palm and he pulled himself together enough to focus one last time. One more hit to the already dropping frame. _Straight down_.

Flashflame roared. Seventy tons of dead weight made contact with the ground at terminal velocity. He vented, suppressing a gasp of pain. Then again. And again.

Sunstorm hovered over the cratered and broken concrete, plating finally cooling enough that energon could drip from his wounds and not combust. The whole impromptu arena was eerily silent, watching. Waiting.

He could finish it for good. It would be simple. Easy. Expected. He _wanted_ to, wanted it badly.

But. Exactly what would it get him, that he didn’t already have? He had been the leader of the Decepticons for three years already. Three years trying to resuscitate a graying corpse.

Killing Megatron wasn’t going to magically fix their lack of mechpower, get their supply chain in order, or stop the Autobots from harrying them. It wasn’t going to stop subcommanders six times his age from thinking that he was an inexperienced brat with no processor for subtlety. All this proved was that he was a good weapon.

And he was going to make enemies within his own faction. Megatron dying by Prime’s hand was one thing- explicable and even, in a certain manner of speaking, acceptable. But Megatron had cultivated a cult of personality around himself that had already made succession difficult. A significant fraction of Decepticons considered Megatron and the Cause synonymous. The inheritance of the new leader, just waiting to stick a knife in between his wings. And there was the black, looming certainty of splinter groups in his future as the ambitious capitalized on the regime change.

So. Megatron created all of these problems. Sunstorm should really just take what belonged to him and dump all the rest in Megatron’s lap. Hang him out as a distraction for the Autobots and let nature take its course as he consolidated. The older he got, the smarter Deathsaurus seemed.

He flicked Thundercracker and Skywarp tightbeam comms telling them to subdue Soundwave and Shockwave. Their prompt acknowledgements were a balm to his scraped-raw nerves.

“Now that I have your full attention,” Sunstorm said, tasting the energon from his split lip. He landed lightly (though not without some effort on his part, his systems were screaming damage reports at him) and turned to face his audience. “Some of you have had…concerns over whether I had the right to lead the Decepticons. Whether I was worthy to rule, because Optimus Prime had dispatched the previous leader and not I.” Sunstorm indicated the unmoving Megatron. “Here, then, is my answer.”

“However, I am not a fool. Some of you would prefer Megatron to me regardless. To those of you who would trust an obviously glitched mech rebuilt- or simply built- and presented to you by Soundwave and Shockwave, I can only say: I wish you good fortune, and you should pray that you never meet me on the battlefield.” Sunstorm paused for a moment to let the implications sink in. He neither knew nor cared if Soundwave and Shockwave had done some processor tampering- but some mechs would, and he would be remiss not to point it out.

“To the rest, I say this. We cannot continue fighting the war in the same manner as the last four million years. We have allowed our goals to become corrupted: Cybertron lies in ruins, her people scattered. We have allowed a mech’s _obsessions_ ,” Sunstorm tilted his chin to indicate Megatron, and tightbeamed Thundercracker and Skywarp with a signal, “to become ours. We have turned our optics from comrades used as experiments. From those who were branded as traitors because of politics.” His trinemates dumped their stasis-cuffed captives next to Megatron with a strut-rattling clatter, keeping their guns trained on the two Decepticons. “In short, we have allowed the excesses of the Senate to infiltrate where they should never have been allowed.” He paused, then gestured to the charred and bleeding Megatron, the bound and kneeling Soundwave, and the half-collapsed Shockwave. “Are you not proud to share a faction with these shining examples of the Decepticon ideal.” He injected irony into his voice. “Strong. Clear-sighted. Capable of taking advice. Concerned with the well-being of their troops.”

“I am young. An MTO. But anyone who has been under my command knows that I do not throw away the lives of my troops for my own pride. I fight to win, not to satisfy my obsession with an Autobot. And I just proved that I am more than strong enough. So, Decepticons, this is the point where _you_ choose.”

Sunstorm kept his spinal strut straight and his steps steady as he headed towards the closest base entry, but slumped the second he was shadowed and out of sight, leaving luminous streaks on the entry hall as he caught himself.

Swift pedesteps announced his trinemates. “Whoa-kay,” Skywarp said, deftly inserting a hand underneath his elbow and taking his weight. “Let’s not fall on our faces.”

“Usually I am the one saying that to you,” Sunstorm observed lightheadedly. Nothing felt quite real, not even the damage warnings cluttering up his HUD. Not even the pain of torn plating and ripped protoform.

“You sure you want to just leave them like that?” Thundercracker asked from behind them. Sunstorm couldn’t see him, but he imagined the blue seeker flicking his wingtips uneasily.

“Who knows, he might die anyway. I blew six holes in his chest.” His mouth twitched with a wry smile, before it died. “Once they got him repaired, there were no good choices. I’m just salvaging what I can. How many do you think I’ll get?”

Thundercracker hummed. “The Air Force and a good chunk of medical. I wouldn’t bet on communications or science. Ground forces, I’d say…late-wave MTOs. But I can’t really be sure with them.” He paused for a minute, then huffed. “Yeah, I’m getting trine reports in right now.”

“It _was_ pretty impressive,” Skywarp said, starting to haul him towards medbay.

“Good. I want the whole thing sliced together and broadcast. As soon as we can get the base packed up, I want everybody who is coming with me on a ship.”

“Why are _we_ leaving?” Skywarp asked, irritated. “Just kick them out.”

“We are only moving up our plans by a few months,” Sunstorm pointed out. “I do _not_ want his hardline supporters at my back looking for revenge. They will be a lot easier to separate out if they are not coming along with us, as opposed to finding them and kicking them out of our base.” Sunstorm leaned his head into Skywarp’s shoulder.

“And besides, the Autobots will be a lot more interested in Megatron than us,” Thundercracker put in with something that looked a lot like spiteful satisfaction.

Sunstorm matched him. “Just so.”


End file.
